War Stories at the Water Cooler

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

Published: August 19, 2003

Over the long weekend, the tales grew in the telling. Miles heroically crossed on foot. Eons trapped in the subway. A night on the sidewalk. Flights of stairs like Everest.

So when many New Yorkers finally saw their co-workers yesterday for the first time since the blackout, it was time to brag — and complain.

Anthony Leone, 45, an MCI engineer, was still aching because of his five-hour march from his Park Avenue office to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

"I never did that walk before, and I never want to do it again," he said, adding that sharing stories from the blackout was the first item on the agenda at work. "You talked all weekend about it with your family, but I haven't seen these guys since, so it all starts again."

Stephanie Tucker, 41, of Coney Island, was the one with bragging rights in her office. An employee of the city's Probation Department, she was stuck inside a subway train in downtown Manhattan when the power died. It took her about an hour and a half to get to the street, then she walked to Brooklyn and waited three hours to catch a bus home. Nobody at the office could top that story, she said.

The city began to return to its normal rhythms yesterday. The subways were running again. The commuter rails were on time. Traffic was moving down Ninth Avenue. And the blocklong line was gone from the Dunkin' Donuts on 42nd Street.

But the city was a different place, if not permanently, at least for the day. People moved a little slower. Some limped, nursing sore hamstrings. Some strutted, proud with how they had coped.

Sair Babury could see that his customers were a bit more cranky, a bit more sluggish, but also feeling a bit better about themselves and their city than on a typical Monday.

"How you doing?" Mr. Babury called out from his coffee cart on West 50th Street yesterday morning as his regular customers walked up. "How'd you get home? I didn't see you Friday."

Mr. Babury has been working this street for four years, greeting the same faces on most mornings. While his observations are certainly not scientific, they are based on years of watching people before their morning cup.

"Oh please, my legs are still tired," Carol Williams shot back at him. "We walked and walked and walked. I am so tired."

Of course, Ms. Williams was also proud, in fact, so proud that she had walked home to Queens (after a "nice lady" gave her a ride through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel), that she pulled out her driver's license to prove her age: 65.

For others, the blackout's message was less flattering. It took four hours for Juan Hernandez, a 44-year-old cabdriver, to walk from 48th Street to his home in Inwood. "I do need exercise," he said he had discovered. "I am too fat. The job is not helping."

Message received: for lunch, Mr. Hernandez had a salad and a Diet Coke.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had his own message, declaring on the morning news shows that New York was still not normal — not in the conventional sense — but that it was back to its ornery self.

"Well, this is New York, so everything is never normal," he said on ABC's "Good Morning America." "But in the context you are asking, yes, subways, traffic lights, power, air-conditioning, people complaining about things, New York is back to normal."

Though the electricity was back, there were still things that needed to be ironed out, the aftereffects of a power failure that had left tens of millions without electricity in much of the Northeast and experts scratching their heads as to exactly how it had happened.

Telephones in many firehouses were still not working, though that apparently did not interfere with emergency service. Some businesses said they were having problems with e-mail systems and Internet access. Thousands of new city schoolteachers, who were in Manhattan for a weeklong mandatory training course, were told that their materials had not been printed, attendees said. Clocks all over the city had to be reset. Delivery schedules had to be changed to make up for the lost workday on Friday.

And employers had to accommodate a certain day-after syndrome, an ailment whose symptoms included a desire to gossip and a sense that the blackout was a license to slide into the week.

"People can't get enough of it," said Marc Harris, 32, a broker for a securities firm in downtown Manhattan. "Talking about the blackout has replaced people talking about Iraq."

Around noon, Hector Sanchez, 31, and Craig Bradshaw, 42, who work in the shipping department of the New York Public Library, sat on a stoop on 39th Street and traded war stories. "It wasn't a big deal," Mr. Bradshaw said with a touch of machismo and a drag on his cigarette.

But it would be, soon: every package and letter that did not get delivered on Friday was about to land in the shipping department all at once, they said. "We're going to be pounded," Mr. Sanchez said.

Kevin Thomas, 26, was already getting pounded. He and his assistant manager, John Degroff, 40, were unloading 800 cases of food, drinks, batteries, flashlights and other supplies that had sold out almost instantly from the CVS near Columbus Circle.

But they, too, found time to pause and trade tales of adventure. "It was crazy," said Mr. Thomas, who added that he had walked all the way from the West Side over the Brooklyn Bridge to Flatbush, holding his 11-month-old daughter, Kamyla, for more than half the way through the dark, crowded, humid streets. "It was like Judgment Day," he said. "My legs still hurt."

Many New Yorkers, like Christine Nowakowski, 49, said they came away from the blackout feeling better about the city and its people. There was a renewed sense that New York was not the every-man-for-himself jungle that it is often thought to be.

Ms. Nowakowski, a social studies teacher in Mount Vernon, had come to the city for the first day after the end of summer school to visit a museum and Central Park, then discovered that there were no trains back home to Westchester.

She ended up spending the night in the street with a group of men who were also stranded.

"I just lay in the gutter next to these six guys," she said. "They looked out for me. I never felt safer in the city. These guys were next to me. They were all calling their families — the amount of `I love you's' was amazing."